Most Creative Marketers: Martin George

Giving customers what they want is at the heart of Martin George’s marketing mojo. In 2000 he led the project to put flat beds into British Airways’ business class cabins, meaning passengers could snooze, dream and stretch their way from London Heathrow to New York’s JFK. With BA the first international airline to offer business passengers a seat that turned into a completely flat six-foot bed, rollout of the innovation across its fleet quickly followed.

The “comfort and privacy” of the new flat Club World beds turned out to be exactly what BA business class customers wanted. It was also a breakthrough moment in George’s career, delivering “overwhelming” customer reaction and “enormous commercial success”.

George considers this his boldest creative moment. “It taught me to be brave and the power of creativity to inspire an organisation. And the utter joy of working with talented colleagues,” he says.

Having joined Waitrose in 2017 from the Post Office – by way of Cadbury, BA and Boots – George is now customer director at the supermarket, heading up its marketing operations. From this role, he hopes to improve customers lives by ensuring their voice is heard and acted upon. This is one of the things he enjoys most about being a marketer, he explains, along with “bringing hope, innovation and inspiration into an organisation, and working with inspired and inspiring colleagues.”

Harnessing collaboration has been one of George’s key strategies throughout his career to date. By leveraging teamwork to bring together skills and experience from diverse background and sectors, he believes customer needs can be identified and addressed. A good creative marketer, he says, looks outside their sector for inspiration, works hard to identify the unmet needs of customers, and influences how customers think, feel and behave. The frustration, he says, is “not always being able to move quickly enough and be first to give customers want they want.”

Always wanting to do better, George’s highlights at Waitrose include the first joint Christmas campaign with John Lewis. “Excitable Edgar”, produced by Adam & Eve DDB for Christmas 2019, “really resonated with our customers” says George, who also led the product-focused, "You can taste when it’s Waitrose & Partners" push in early 2020. The four-part campaign, without music or narration, simply followed the farming process behind products including fruit, eggs and sourdough, to highlight the retailer’s commitment to sourcing high-quality ingredients. Waitrose also launched recipes on Waitrose.com: with Waitrose’s Ocado relationship now having come to an end, growing the brand’s own online platform is a priority for the retailer.

And it’s a pivotal point for the John Lewis Partnership as it strives to pull the Waitrose and John Lewis brands closer together. Its restructure will see £1 billion invested into modernising the store estate and transforming its online offering. The Partnership, under chairman Sharon White, aims to make £300m annual cost savings by 2022.

Having amassed a wealth of marketing knowledge working across a wide variety of brands during his 37-year career, George believes that the single most important factor in creativity is originality. This is perhaps why his own current creative heroes are the artist and author Harland Miller, and actor, screenwriter and director, Michaela Coel, whose award-winning drama “I May Destroy You” was praised as “an extraordinary, breath-taking exploration of consent, race and millennial life that works on every level.”

Excited by the “boundless opportunity” presented by the future, George looks for similar qualities in creative agency partners. The best, he says, “never accept second best, have no boundaries to thinking and are willing to challenge; co-creating the brief and outcome. They should have total open-mindedness about solutions and bring a broad diversity of capabilities to a brief, in order to deliver commercial success for clients.”

So, is George satisfied with the line-up of agencies producing work for the Waitrose brand? “I couldn’t be happier with the restlessness, curiosity and continual drive for excellence that I see from our agencies,” he says. And with his own imagination nourished by “the creativity of Netflix, the dedication of the NHS and the endless wonder of nature,” George seems like just the high-quality ingredient to deliver whatever Waitrose customers want next.